How can the government provide adequate technical oversight of its contractors if it doesn’t hire engineers? Answer: it can’t, and you can routinely see the results.
Again, why would a good engineer work for the government? If the government can’t and won’t hire engineers, how can they create informed requirements for contracts or provide technical oversight of their contractors? You can see this playing out in boondoggle after boondoggle. The government poorly specifies a contract, a contractor bids on the contract, the government changes requirements over and over because the lack of technical expertise implies they have no idea what they want, the contractor rakes in tons of money due to direction changes, and eventually the contractor delivers something shitty because the people at the government also had no idea how to evaluate whether the contractor was meeting milestones.
In terms of GS-15, their pay goes up to 170k, so its not like GS-15 step 1 is the end of the road. Federal employees have also been receiving above-inflation pay raises and COLA adjustments the last few years.
So why would a good engineer work for the government? Honestly, if pay is your only metric you use to choose your place of employment, then I would not expect them to. However, as I have mentioned, there are plenty of people in the world who choose their place of employment based on many factors other than compensation.
Is government work frustrating? Sure. I'm sure the same can be said of for the engineer developing a CRUD application and has a shitty senior engineer overseeing them. Government work can also be incredibly rewarding and unfortunately, the majority of the time you only hear about the government failures instead of its successes. The federal government issues in excess of 500 billion in contracts per year...I assure you, there are successes in there and I have seen some federal agencies that have implemented acquisition processes and development practices that are competitive with some SV companies.
I've not claimed that government can't do anything right, and I strongly believe in government. I do however believe that current public policy is designed to cause government to fail. Lots of contracts in that yearly $500 billion are successful, but things like the F-35 program, the Littoral Combat Ship, the Space Launch System, Healthcare.gov, the fuck ups in this article, and more are big enough that they eat pretty significantly into that $500 billion budget. The government has some serious issues procuring engineering work. Some pork politics certainly contribute, but lack of technical expertise at federal agencies is, I think, a significant factor.
I should probably clarify that there are some federal agencies that hire engineers as federal employees. For example, NSA, NASA, JPL, etc. To your point, they do have better success when it comes to engineering. However, they are also agencies that have a primary mission/function which requires it. For other agencies, it’s not all that easy for them to justify career engineering employees when the roles are tertiary functions. It’s not to say they don’t have them, but it is to say that they have far less of that expertise. That is why entities such as 18F and USDS exist though, to help fill that role.
While it seems like you are not keen on giving it a try, I highly encourage you to give government work a shot even if only on a temporary basis with somewhere like USDS or 18F. Only way to help make positive changes to the way government does business is through people with the drive and talent to do so. There is plenty of opportunity to influence those types of changes, even at lower ends of the employment hierarchy.
Appreciate the conversation and you offering your perspective!